Barcarolle Chopin Quotes

As the devoted wife of a man that worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams ~ Kate Chopin

They want me to give another concert but I have no desire to do so. You cannot imagine what a torture the three days before a public appearance are to me. ~ Frederic Chopin

Regardless of my transient joys, I am never free of a feeling of melancholy which somehow forms the base of my heart. ~ Chopin

Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had with French literature. And none, of course, could have known in advance that the 1830s and '40s in Paris were to mark the beginning of the great era of Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, and Baudelaire, not to say anything of Delacroix in painting or Chopin and Liszt in music. ~ David McCullough

A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled, down, down to the water ~ Kate Chopin

When Doctor Mandelet dined with the Pontelliers on Thursday he could discern in Mrs. Pontellier no trace of that morbid condition which her husband had reported to him. She was excited and in a manner radiant. ~ Kate Chopin

She had resolved to never take another step backward. ~ Kate Chopin

As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes,I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong. ~ Frederic Chopin

The Ratignolles understood each other perfectly. If ever the fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union. ~ Kate Chopin

There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. ~ Kate Chopin

Discs of umbrellas poured over suburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Time doesn't concern me. ~ Kate Chopin

Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars ... Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit ... I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man. ~ Frederic Chopin

She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. ~ Kate Chopin

Would you think of somebody who you adore, who's no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover - somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time follow the line all the way from B to E, and you'll hear everything that Chopin had to say. ~ Benjamin Zander

When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher. ~ Frederic Chopin

She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth. ~ Kate Chopin

We need more bodies, 'cause it's not looking enough like the last scene in Hamlet already.
Chopper Jim Chopin ~ Dana Stabenow

She put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades to see if my wings were strong. ~ Kate Chopin

She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world. ~ Kate Chopin

I have owned and played a Steinway all my life. It's the best Beethoven piano. The best Chopin piano. And the best Ray Charles piano. I like it, too. ~ Randy Newman

She's got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women. ~ Kate Chopin

[On Chopin's Preludes:]
His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky ... The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power. ~ George Sand

There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to "feed upon opinion" when her own soul had invited her. ~ Kate Chopin

My earthly body has been a terrible disappointment to me. ~ Frederic Chopin

Feeling secure regarding their happiness and welfare, she did not miss them except with an occasional, intense longing. ~ Kate Chopin

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano. ~ Gary Oldman

Step by step she lived over every instant of the time she had been with Robert ... She recalled his words, his looks. How few and meager they had been for her hungry heart! ... She wondered when he would come back. He had not said he would come back. She had been with him had heard his voice and touched his hand. But some way he had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico. ~ Kate Chopin

Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.

Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."

Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.

Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills. (last lines) ~ Kate Chopin

You already know when I'm writing, so don't be surprised if it's short and dry, because I'm too hungry to write anything fat ~ Frederic Chopin

I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers. ~ Joni Mitchell

She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. ~ Kate Chopin

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,
when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. ~ Kate Chopin

It was an unforgettable picture to see Chopin sitting at the piano like a clairvoyant, lost in his dreams; to see how his vision communicated itself through his playing, and how, at the end of each piece, he had the sad habit of running one finger over the length of the plaintive keyboard, as though to tear himself forcibly away from his dream. ~ Robert Schumann

Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano! ~ Frederic Chopin

She seemed to have apprehended all of the composer's coldness and none of his poetry. ~ Kate Chopin

He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business. ~ Kate Chopin

No multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire. ~ Kate Chopin

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world ... ~ Frederic Chopin

If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake. ~ Stephen Fry

How long will you be gone?"
"Forever, perhaps. I don't know. It depends upon a good many things. ~ Kate Chopin

The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant. ~ Kate Chopin

So imagine a fire going
wood snapping the way it does when it's a little green - the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains
and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys
and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning.
And so you dare to be happy.
You do that thing.
You dare. ~ Steven Millhauser

Music is the worst of them - roiling and boiling - overly emotionalized on the one hand, overly intellectuallized on the other. Bach and Mozart indeed! Bach inevitably makes me think of fish in a barrel! round and round and round they go and nothing ever happens. Nothing ! Tum -de-dum-dum. Tum -de-dum-dum and that's all! Tum -de-dum-de-bloody-dum-dum! As for Mozart, his emotions did not mature beyond the age of twelve. never achieved adolescence, let alone puberty. his music merely combines a popular talent for slapstick and a commercial talent for tears. No - not tears. For sobs. Beethoven, pompous. Chopin - sickly sweet and given to tantrums - Tum -de-dum-dum- Bang! and Wagner - a self -centred bore. and Stravinsky - discordant, rude and blows his music through his nose ~ Timothy Findley

The peace and beauty of a spring day had descended upon the earth like a benediction. ~ Kate Chopin